Twitter Takes Steps To Frustrate NSA, Other Government Snoops
Twitter announced Friday that it's joining other tech companies in implementing "perfect forward secrecy." While many online services already encrypt user comunications and other data, this form of encryption ensures that snoops—we're looking at you, National Security Agency—who break through the encryption get access to only a snippet of data, rather than everything belonging to a user. Even where a warrant is involved, perfect forward secrecy has the potential to limit intrusions, rather than acting as an open-ended skeleton key.
From Twitter's Jacob Hoffman-Andrews:
As part of our continuing effort to keep our users' information as secure as possible, we're happy to announce that we recently enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com, api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com. On top of the usual confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users' encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter's private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins describes how perfect forward secrecy works:
How can perfect forward secrecy help protect user privacy against that kind of threat? In order to understand that, it's helpful to have a basic idea of how HTTPS works in general. Every Web server that uses HTTPS has its own secret key that it uses to encrypt data that it sends to users. Specifically, it uses that secret key to generate a new "session key" that only the server and the browser know. Without that secret key, the traffic traveling back and forth between the user and the server is incomprehensible, to the NSA and to any other eavesdroppers.
But imagine that some of that incomprehensible data is being recorded anyway—as leaked NSA documents confirm the agency is doing. An eavesdropper who gets the secret key at any time in the future—even years later—can use it to decrypt all of the stored data! That means that the encrypted data, once stored, is only as secure as the secret key, which may be vulnerable to compromised server security or disclosure by the service provider.
That's where perfect forward secrecy comes in. When an encrypted connection uses perfect forward secrecy, that means that the session keys the server generates are truly ephemeral, and even somebody with access to the secret key can't later derive the relevant session key that would allow her to decrypt any particular HTTPS session. So intercepted encrypted data is protected from prying eyes long into the future, even if the website's secret key is later compromised.
Facebook also plans to implement perfect forward secrecy, and Google has had it in place since 2011. Google points out that "not even the server operator will be able to retroactively decrypt HTTPS sessions," meaning that companies that implement the security can't turn users' lives into open books, no matter the pressure they face.
As fuck-yous to the surveillance state go, this is both welcome, and effective.
